A Complaint Against "The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman"

If Wordsworth actually set out to subvert or work against the kind of anthropology resulting from the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment period as Alan Bewell outlines in Wordsworth and Enlightenment, then what can be made of the poem, “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman,” found in the Lyrical Ballads, which seems to challenge this notion? Bewell writes that “Wordsworth’s emphasis on an interactive, participatory mode of observation also represents a qualitatively different notion of what anthropology is” (Bewell, 34) and that “Instead of an outward movement, into the sphere of the exotic or into romance, Wordsworth returns these wanders homeward and binds them to an English place” (32). This all results in the ‘double’ self for the poet/speaker that Bewell also mentions, where “the outward glance was simultaneously a way of looking inward” (35).

And yet, with “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman,” we potentially have a “marginalized” individual as “anthropological artifact” or “figure invested with clearly articulated speculative concerns and interpretations” (28) in the traditional sense of moral philosophy that Wordsworth is said to challenge. Bewell does admit that “Wordsworth occasionally succumbed to the temptation of writing moral philosophy through empirical figures” (41). He more specifically addresses the poem in question, writing, “Only one poem in Lyrical Ballads, ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman,’ depicts a figure who has not undergone transformation, its sources in Samuel Hearne’s Journey from Hudson’s Bay to the Northern Ocean (1795) being all too explicit” (32). Before giving us the actual poem, Wordsworth adds an element of immediate certainty with an almost encyclopedia-like entry, telling the reader about a particular custom of the “Northern Indian,” upon which the poem will draw. Nowhere else in the Lyrical Ballads do we have this kind of anthropological factoid so brazenly foregrounding our read. This initial explanatory paragraph definitely gives us the sense that some kind of “empirical figure” will follow, and yet the poem itself attempts to take up (perhaps appropriate) the voice of the North Indian Woman (it is the woman that is speaking, rather than a speaker speaking about her). This move can maybe be read in two ways: perhaps it grants the woman subjectivity in such a way as to resist or challenge her status as “anthropological artifact,” or perhaps it erases, bastardizes, or colonize whatever the woman’s genuine experience might be, since Wordsworth can be said to have no access (or right) into it.

I do find it curious that Wordsworth attempts a first-person view in the voice of the woman here. It’s done in other poems (The Female Vagrant), but far more common are the poems where the speaker engages or mediates the title character for the reader. Having a speaker interact with or present another character might seem to lend itself more readily to “anthropological artification,” but here we actually have that “participatory mode of observation” that Bewell speaks of. Is it because the Northern Indian Woman is so other that Wordsworth cannot place himself in a position of “participation” with her? Many of the other characters in The Lyrical Ballads are other or marginalized, but they are all returned to England in some way or share some common sense of experience with Wordsworth. With no genuine way into a kind of communion with the woman, maybe Wordsworth simply opts to take her over as a way around some kind of real engagement. The poem itself does not contain anything overly offensive or stereotypical, in fact, it seems somehow exceedingly sparse, as if who the speaker is isn’t as nearly important to the poem as many of the other characters are to all the other pieces found in the collection. Ultimately, I feel like the woman remains to be fully realized in this poem and that the whole vision here was a bit of a false start for Wordsworth.

It’s also interesting to note that Wordsworth moved this poem very close to the front of the 1800 edition, but then moved it to volume 2 of the 1802 edition. Maybe we can talk more about this in class.